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Why the Vibe change on Trump?
I think this is a very good marginal revolution posts. My personal journey I never abandoned him after 1/6 but always preferred Desantis. I actually liked 1/6 and thought the right needed a proper riot after the gaslighting on peaceful protests.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/the-changes-in-vibes-why-did-they-happen.html
Read the post but I will add 3 he missed.
Anyone with an ounce of political instincts realized lawfare against Trump meant the GOP needed to unite around Trump. That killed Desantis. Desantis with Trump removed by lawfare without winning at the ballot box would lose the maga vote which meant a Dem landslide.
He’s changed a lot of positions that appeal to median voters. Lighter on abortion and supporting gay rights. Cutting off some Dem attack point.
The Jews. I think I can fairly say they control 35-50% of our media. Political social media influencers on both sides have similar numbers. The pro-Hamas part of the left should scare the shit out of them. And Trump has come out very supportive of the Jewish community. Hannania has it right do you want that 10% of the vote that’s oppressor-oppressed ideologues of the tiny Jewish vote with money and media influence? I would be curious if Cowen sees this but won’t write it or if he has a mind block on these things.
Vibes do matter. People want to fit in with their tribe. If the vibe is Trump bad then they will say Trump bad. If the vibe is Trump good and their suppose to support him they will.
For the GOP the vibes at the convention feels like happy people. The Dems don’t feel like that right now.
As a lesser point Cowen called Trump a comedian and a very good one. It seems like a lot of politicians now are comedians. Milei, Zelensky, Trump, Boris Johnson.
The other very important point is that Trump has convinced large numbers of people that he wasn't in power* between March and November 2020, and therefore should not be blamed for America's buttock-clenchingly pisspoor response to COVID-19 (Americans had more restrictions and more deaths than countries with a competent response like Taiwan, or even a barely adequate response like Germany). This matters, because by far the strongest arguments for "1st-term Trump was an unusually bad President" are the botched COVID-19 response and that he tried to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.
A lot of people voted for Biden (or stayed home despite being natural Republicans) on the basis of "COVID sucks, and it probably sucks more than it needs to because the government screwed up, so vote out the incumbent). The vibes have now changed to "2017-19 were pretty good, so Trump must have been an okay President".
* I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
It’s also worth noting that between May and October 2020, the mob (and mob supporters) were in control of large portions of the country, to the point that the government couldn’t mobilize a proper response to them. Hence the claim about “deep state” holding more water, and that people that originally voted for Trump saw him do nothing about that, so they voted for the mob’s candidate instead.
This didn’t happen in other countries more or less at all.
Are you talking about BLM protests?
Because I don’t think that’s a reasonable description of the scenario at all.
Yes, I'm talking about the BLM riots.
The government arms nominally tasked with quelling them refused to do so; by definition, the government lost control of those areas. The faction responsible for the riots then proceeded to win the election in 2020.
Thus I don't believe it unreasonable to assume the continuity of that faction's governance also includes the summer of 2020 (and the actions of the bureaucracy that specifically enabled them by exempting them from public health orders). The same would not have been true had that faction lost. What supporters of a particular faction do matters to the general public's perception of who's in charge.
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